Cheap Android tablets are all over the place, and generally not any good. They often have resistive touch screens instead of capacitive ones, are slow, or have no access to the Android Market. For Ice Cream Sandwich, MIPS Technologies is trotting out its existing Honeycomb tablet - which, you guessed it, uses a MIPS processor - licensed to Ainovo. For some reason, that makes this $99 tablet with capacitive screen kind of interesting.

Having just purchased the Nook Color not too long ago, I'd rather spend money on something with a keyboard and a bigger screen with a great battery (like the Asus Transformer ... except I guess I'll wait till prices are competitive with x86 laptops).

This is a marketing failure. People freak out when they see a shipping fee thats %60 of the price, even if the total isn't that bad of a deal. The right approach is to price that at $140 with $20 shipping. The company still gets the same amount of money, but it seems like a better deal to most people.

>> Tablets with this hardware already wholesale in China for well under $150.

Are you joking or just don't see anything behind the numbers?
Cheap china tablets are unusable crap stuffed with Rockhip, weak batteries and cheap plastic.
Sorry, but even Archos things are million times better than that "tablets".

Have you handled any of the devices? The plastic the use for the cheap devices? It's not Samsung grade plastic, it's the low end knockoff children's toys plastic.

In addition, I just checked - Tegra2 1GB RAM, 8GB storage with 1280x800 is sill about $300 in high volume. With lower rez panel it's $20 off.
For Cortex A9 from Zenithink(that crap) with 512Mb RAM and 4-8GB storage at 1024x600 it's 140-200.

These tablets have 1GHz A9 Cortex, capacitative touchscreens, 1GB RAM and 8GB memory.
Haha. That's I wrote. You are blinded with the numbers and don't see anything behind them.

If you really think a display costs $200
How $99 is transformed to $200 now?
Famous iSupply breakdown state $89 for the panel Apple using.

Glass and aluminium are used by brainless designers who prefer form over function.
LOL I'm brainless user who prefers glass and aluminium over cheap china plastic toys.
At least I respect myself to stay away from crappy made things.

I don't need to "try", I actually know.
Sure with the most crappy panel, soft plastic and so on. A capacitive panel is still rather expensive.

Rockchip, Via WonderMedia and Amlogic devices are are cheap, anything with a proper CPU is much more expensive.

You link to an article that says how much Tegra3 costs, without any mention of how much actual devices cost. Next time try contacting an actual Chinese manufacturer for a quote. I use quite a few contacts that I have left from my career in procurement.

I'm serious. Apple is going to be totally overwhelmed by many powerful and dirt cheap tablets and phones within 6-12 months.

Tablets are "lifestyle" machines, not commodity devices... If you can afford a tablet you don't need to scrape the bottom of the barrel. People buy Tablets not because they need them, but because they WANT them... Apple will dominate the Tablet market for as long as the tablet is a luxury device, as soon as they become commodity devices that is when Apple will suffer market losses, only then will cheap tablets have a real market.

Back on topic, from hardware point of view the MIPS is beautiful... It truly is my favourite CPU ISA (possibly only just second to 68k, but only because I have history there with my Amiga experience). But from a practical perspective, the ARM wins hands down... Designed not by idealist scientists (like MIPS), but by two engineers (with virtually no budget) it makes sensible engineering trade offs that allow it to dominate the Low Power market.

Like Thom, I also wouldn't mind this device just for exotic hardware geek lust, though I wouldn't expect it to be a practical device

People buy Tablets not because they need them, but because they WANT them... Apple will dominate the Tablet market for as long as the tablet is a luxury device, as soon as they become commodity devices that is when Apple will suffer market losses, only then will cheap tablets have a real market.

You're right, tablets are luxury devices because most of the people don't need it. But when people will stop wanting them, cheap tablets are not going to have a real market... it will simply collapse.

Tablets are "lifestyle" machines, not commodity devices... If you can afford a tablet you don't need to scrape the bottom of the barrel. People buy Tablets not because they need them, but because they WANT them... Apple will dominate the Tablet market for as long as the tablet is a luxury device, as soon as they become commodity devices that is when Apple will suffer market losses, only then will cheap tablets have a real market.

There's some logic loop, non sequitur of sorts there - paraphrasing, roughly: one very successful tablet doesn't target lesser people ...hence there's no real market for tablets which would target them?

It's not really about scraping the bottom of the barrel (that's a very relative thing) either, there are billions of people who would probably do well with a tablet - there are 2+ billion PC users, 5+ billion mobile subscribers (how many of them need those phones? how were they able to get by a short decade ago?); the numbers receptive to some kind of a tablet* possibly fall somewhere in-between, and Apple openly states distaste for targeting them.

With economies of scale & software base the choices of those people should, yeah, in time overwhelm classes of devices aiming at "premium" image (oh well, home computers, Macintosh, workstations and PC all over again). And it will be very much a "lifestyle" for many (most?) of them, just as mobile phones already are.

PS. * Though I wouldn't be too surprised if we'd - partially or largely - settle on, essentially, small tablets with phone functionality (just without their usual now, in developed markets at least, silly price premiums); at least it would finally give real purpose to Bluetooth headsets...
(and, in a "largely" variant, would allow many to claim that Apple never gave away the tablet market; while what would really happen is that the rest of the world leapfrogged it, like with music players)

Tablets are "lifestyle" machines, not commodity devices... If you can afford a tablet you don't need to scrape the bottom of the barrel. People buy Tablets not because they need them, but because they WANT them... Apple will dominate the Tablet market for as long as the tablet is a luxury device, as soon as they become commodity devices that is when Apple will suffer market losses, only then will cheap tablets have a real market.

There is already a massive market for cheap tablets - children. A tablet is a movie player, story book and games machine all in one. Even the very cheapest 7" tablets are more than adequate for keeping a child amused.

Within 12-24 months the tablet will be as common as a games console or a DVD player in middle class homes.

Though I disagree with Uncle Fester's original point, I do agree with this. There's still plenty of untapped market for tablets, particularly for kids. However, my kids have iPod touches, and they're actually a little bit more practical for a lot of the things mentioned here (entertainment) precisely because they're smaller and more portable.

But of course the ipod touch costs $200. I think that cheap tablets will probably spur Apple to do two things: an intermediate tablet between the touch and the ipad, and pushing the price down until the touch is $99 and they have a 7" tablet for $199.

The reality is that most people don't care about raw specs, but on the actual experience of using the device. My wife has a much better phone spec wise than her friend who has an original iphone 3g. However, her Sony Experia X10 keeps crapping out on her: slowing down randomly rebooting, ect. That doesn't happen to her friend with the older, slower cpu'd less memoried, iphone.

Not to mention that their specs have been competitive lately. Still haven't seen a tablet or phone with a better GPU than the iPad2. Perhaps the Tegra3 surpasses it, but I haven't seen any benchmarks on that yet and it isn't out in anything.

Anandtech has a review of the Asus eeePad Transformer Prime, using a quad-core Tegra3. For most of the benchmarks, the iPad2 and TF are neck-and-neck. Which, is actually kind of sad, considering that the Tegra3 is clocked much higher with 2 extra cores. But, the CPU in the A5 is a beast that nothing else can touch as of yet.

I'm serious. Apple is going to be totally overwhelmed by many powerful and dirt cheap tablets and phones within 6-12 months.

Would be really nice, but I am unsure. Netbooks for example seem to become more expensive here (Europe). At least I bought my first one for just above 100EUR and three years later I can't really find anything comparable. Of course they have become better, but the main reason - at least for me - for buying such a device is that they are cheaper than something comparable.

I wonder if this is the same MIPS CPU Commissioned by the PRC Military and Intelligence Services. The same one featured in a new super computer produced by the Chinese Government. This should be interesting to watch. I wonder what hidden potential/pitfalls are in that Chinese MIPS CPU.

Generally there's no key for http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/元 (the everyday handwritten symbol in China & Taiwan), so ¥ is often used, even if most Westerners associate it only with Japanese yen (understandable given China's previous low level of of economic interaction with the West).

I won't pay 60 bucks for shipping, but when it becomes a locally available device I may very well spend $100 on it and maybe $10-15 shipping. I would like to play with it and 100 bucks isn't a purchase I need to budget/save for, but $200 would be.

Having a Playstation or PS2 (oh, only the best-selling console in history, overall; and PS1: 2nd best-selling among non-handhelds), also an early PS3 model with hardware "emulation" of PS2, or maybe one of many consumer WiFi routers & NAS devices, brings geek points?
Hm, OK then.

Didn't Thom have, IIRC, a PS2 at some point? That's two MIPS processors right there... (the 2nd taking over as a main one in PS1 mode)

I also prefer MIPS ISA because it can trap on integer overflow which is nice for efficient Ada compilation.

But unfortunately nearly nobody use a language with this (nice) behaviour instead of stupid C/C++ or Java's behaviour on integer overflow, so it doesn't really matter: both ISAs are quite nice, much better than x86 anyway.

"But unfortunately nearly nobody use a language with this (nice) behaviour instead of stupid C/C++ or Java's behaviour on integer overflow, so it doesn't really matter"

I share the same gripe of the C language. It offers no way to use or act upon the overflow, leading to less efficient algorithms.

Also, I think modulo arithmetic should be made explicit. Languages like C/Java that implicitly discard overflow information lead to bugs regardless of architecture. New languages should automatically assert errors on overflow unless told to do otherwise.

You may be right about mips handling overflow better than x86, but I actually don't mind the way the x86 does it.

Uh? MIPS has two version of integer operation: ADD/ADDU, SUB/SUBU (one which trap on overflow, one which doesn't and corresponds to modulo operation) (not sure about multiplication and division though), so the big thing here is that there is nearly no difference in performance between "modulo" computations and "trap on overflow" computations(*) which isn't the same with other ISA.

*: not 100% true even if both operations have the same performance because "trap on overflow" allow less reorganization than modulo arithmetic.

"Uh? MIPS has two version of integer operation: ADD/ADDU, SUB/SUBU (one which trap on overflow, one which doesn't and corresponds to modulo operation"

I wasn't really disagreeing with you.

"so the big thing here is that there is nearly no difference in performance between 'modulo' computations and 'trap on overflow' computations(*) which isn't the same with other ISA."

To be fair we'd need to actually test the performance differences on real CPUs. We cannot draw performance conclusions by counting instructions. For some x86 CPUs, jumps are "free" as long as they are predictable.

So, the unpredictable branches hurt the performance, but I have to question whether a MIPS trap would do any better. Can MIPS do overflow checking without a trap? So long as the overflow is exceptional behaviour, I think we should both agree from these tests that the extra jump won't make any significant difference.

Now maybe it's true an inordinate amount of silicon has gone to branch prediction in the x86, which may have theoretically gone to better use in the MIPS, but you can't deny the x86 seems to do a decent job in this microbenchmark. Unfortunately I don't have a MIPS processor to test with.

I have cheap ass android tablet, and I swear me of just seven years ago would have killed for it. Resistive touch screens? I can read the web, ALL OF WIKIPEDIA IN FULL COLOUR, ebooks, and even comics on the thing. With a linux kernal underneath everything. I'm sad that this is in any way considered bad. Better than it's good? Sure, I'll accept that. But just being able to do one of those things at a price of a couple of dinners should be considered amazing. Let alone all of them.

Tablets are only considered luxury devices because they have been expensive until very recently. Within a year or so tablets will cheap enough ($100-150) to be used as electronic toys for children. They will then sell tens of millions each year.

Tablets are not price sensitive because they are a luxury, not the other way around

I used to have/use a Casio PocketPC (MIPS) back when HP and Palm were popular pocket devices. It was pretty good for its day but most software wouldn't run on it because of the processor. I will stick with ARM these days for my portable devices thank you.

I don't know why this stupid architecture is still around. Anything I've ever used with MIPS in it was horribly slow and buggy. You know what I'm talking about. Especially MIPS routers are a NIGHTMARE to deal with!

I don't know why this stupid architecture is still around. Anything I've ever used with MIPS in it was horribly slow and buggy. You know what I'm talking about. Especially MIPS routers are a NIGHTMARE to deal with!

From most companies I've had to deal with? Something tells me coincidence is the least likely option here. A flawed architecture (or at least, an implementation of it) seems more likely.

1) Learn the difference between architecture and implementation.

2) MIPS has always played second fiddle in terms of performance and stability because there never has been the sort of investments required in the compiler tool chain and optimisations made to the various GNU components which make up LInux (or any other *NIX like operating system that uses GNU tools such as GCC).

Btw, ARM used to be like this years ago - back when Corel launched the 'NetWinder' running its own version of Linux the performance was appalling, the stability and bugginess of applications was horrific but here we are almost a decade later and things have changed remarkably. The question is whether MIPS and partners are willing to make the necessary investment so that it is a first class citizen in a world dominated by x86 and so far I've seen no indication that MIPS is willing to put the resources into what needs to be done.

This holiday season, toy makers have turned Apple's pricey tablet and smartphone into playthings for kids. They figure in this weak economy, parents will be willing to splurge on toys for their children that utilise devices they already have - or want - themselves.

Have to agree here. Most people, unlike the ones who generally visit this site, are very poor hunt and peck typists who aren't nearly so inconvenienced by lack of a keyboard like I am especially.

For kids: yeah it's a great option. You can teach them starting piano interactively, they can do paint programs, watch videos, etc. This tablet for $100, well it's absolutely perfect for that audience.

- people will spend a lot of money on their children. In Australia about 40% of children attend private primary and high schools. These schools cost $5,000-40,000/year.

So you're contradicting yourself. You say cheap tablets will dominate for children, and then you say it doesn't matter because parents will and are already paying premium prices for iPads.

- the average toddler doesn't doesn't give a shit about a aesthetics, screen resolution or battery life. As long as they can watch a Wiggles video or play a simple game they are happy.

Except tablets aren't being bought only for toddlers. Yes people buy them and give them to their kids to play games on sometimes. But lots of people also then pick it up and use it themselves once the kids have gone to bed.

- for children the perfect tablet has a 7-8" low resolution screen, a low end CPU and a thick plastic case.

Oh really. And you've done the research on this I assume?

I can guarantee that next Xmas there will be super cheap ($70-100) child specific tablets in the stores.

Great. Is anyone even arguing this point? So what if there is? How does that affect the existing market, or support your statement that apple is in trouble? Apple is not interested in making a $100 kid's toy, and this is not the tablet market. It might be part of it, but it isn't the whole thing by a long shot.

I don't know where in Australia you're located but as early as 2003 (I was living in Canberra at the time) Apple computers and i-devices were flying out the door - the local Dick Smiths were selling them faster than they could get it supplied by Apple. I've since visited Australia a few times since arriving back in New Zealand and Apple has gone from strength to strength without any let up. You keep going on about Android - great, buy a phone and find 6 months later the hand set as abandoned you by refusing to provide software updates in a timely manner - sorry, I'll sit here pretty with my iPhone 4 and receive updates for 3 years whilst the Android phone you purchased outright for just under a grand has been abandoned in under 6 months.

Btw, here I am in New Zealand whose GDP per capita is well below that of Australia and I see i-devices everywhere with Android only ever popping up when it comes to carrier branded Android devices such as the Vodafone 455, 555 and the 858 or in the case of Telecom's XT Network there is a Huawei X1 - all of which are running outdated unsupported versions of Android. Android's only marketshare is being gained in the low end bargain basement for teenagers who, as soon as they get some cash, quickly upgrade to an i-device at the earliest opportunity.

Btw, there is a reason why Apple is still selling 3GS - it is their price fighting phone to compete against the low end Android because that is where the Android is growing, not in the upper segments but down in the bargain basement carrier branded low end segment.

Apple devotees (rightly) point to the fact that Android tablets didn't gain much traction this last year. However, they fail to consider the fact that Android didn't even have a dedicated Tablet OS until this last month. Every tablet thus far has been loaded with a shoehorned, bastardized version of a smartphone specific OS. The only Gingerbread version created for a tablet that's worth speaking about so far is Cyanogenmod7. And that's only been loaded on hacked hardware by geeks.
Hence forth, Ice Cream Sandwich will be available on even the cheapest China tabs. As is evident with this $99.00 tablet with a capacitive screen (even at 840x480)and otherwise pretty respectable hardware specs when compared to pretty good tablets of just a year ago.

What I particularly like about these low end devices is that they seem to all have better connectivity. Full sized USB host ports and SD card slots are the norm it seems.
You can buy a case with a USB keyboard for a 7" tablet for around $20.00. That will make this Tablet, fully outfitted with a keyboard and case less than $150.

Also, you need to consider that blue-tooth keyboards can't be used on an airplane and must be charged separately as well.

Kids who are naturally brand-slaves, who like brand-slave adults judge their self worth by their possessions, will ask for iPads but they'll more and more be getting Android Tablets. I think ICS is going to make a big difference in Android Tablet uptake.

I understand the geek love for the MIPS version of the Novo 7, but why does the article completely neglect the earlier ARM version of the tablet? Sure the Novo7 Basic comes with Icecream Sandwich, which is definitely a selling point in its favor, but the price of that updated OS is compatibility, which along with the well known issues of possibly needing to find MIPS complied applications makes me really hesitant about its longevity in the market. Much better to get an ARM processor tablet, which if some of the posts online are to be believed actually gets double the battery life of this MIPS tablet.

Plus, while this MIPS tablet seems sold out at their Paypal link (LOL this is totally legit guise...) you can still find the Novo 7 advance at various retailers. It may not come with Icecream Sandwich yet, but there seems far more likelihood of updates to it, if for no other reason than the ease of porting within the same processor groups.

Can you really go wrong? In the 7 inch Tablet market in the US, What are your options? You can't consider a Nook (no matter the flavor), nor the Kindle Fire, true Tablets. They're more-so bastardized devices built to sell media from their respective makers. Case in point, The Nook Color and Nook Tablet lack cameras, bluetooth, microphones(Kindle Fire), external memory slot (Kindle Fire), USB connectivity for third party 3G/4G support.

Now Let's talk about a real US Tablet in the 7 inch realm. The Samsung GalaxyTab 7 inch. This has all of the above, But at $499(verizon w/o plan), that's quadruple the price of The Ainovo7. And WITH a Verizon 2 Year Plan, it's DOUBLE the price.

But then again, there's the Archos Arnova 7 inch tablet. At around $146, it's heavily bastardized. It Ha s a microphone, no camera, no bluetooth, and is landscape oriented.

Now the Ainovo7 May not be an iPad killer(Since the 10 inch market is totally irrelevent here), but given the price($99, & $160 with shipping), features, and lack of a serious contender in the 7 inch Tablet market, can you really go wrong?
At most, I seriously hope that it draws enough attention to move Samsung, Asus, and any other major OEM in the tablet business to engineer a better tablet for less.